Maintain Your Body for Long Lasting Health & Mobility

Optimize Your Running Form with Brian Mackenzie

Maintain Your Body for Long Lasting Health & Mobility

Lesson 14 of 19

Optimize Your Running Form with Brian Mackenzie

Lesson Info

Optimize Your Running Form with Brian Mackenzie

It's my great pleasure to introduce obviously one of my best friends. We live five houses apart, and the amount of tinkering, and if you understood the number of texts and videos that went back of people in good positions and bad positions, I'm a little bit codependent on Brian, I'm not gonna lie, it's okay.
This is stuff that not everybody needs to see or hear, though.
(laughing) That's right.
It has to be filtered first.
So you can find Brian on crossfitendurance.com, and the reason we thought it was really important to include this is that moving yourself through the environment is what the human being was designed for. It was designed to locomote. This is what the brain existed for primarily. In fact, the new research says that they found out that the reason the brain evolved was simply to move through the environment. That's why the nervous system exists, and the fundamentals of walking and fundamentals of just running to get across the street or even for fitness are so mi...

sunderstood. One of the things that we said earlier was, hey look, you have to come out unharmed to these things, one rep or at a million duty cycles. And one of the things we absolutely see regularly is that people engage in a lot of running, and they're able to do that task completion. Hey I ran this marathon, I didn't have pain, nothing broke initially, and then all of a sudden, something bad happens, I wear a hole in my knee, I start to herniate discs. For example, Brian and I did a post together about this position as we know is not a stable position and its impact on neck position running, and we got four or five emails talking about people who are only runners who had herniated discs and everyone in their community was miffed how they'd herniated the discs in their neck. And one of the problems is that this is one of those movements, walking and running that create so many duty cycles, so many evolutions, so many kind of uses on the body that if we're not organized and thinking about it critically, you're gonna be shocked what ends up happening in the long run. Now one of the things we've talked about is that said, hey position's a skill. We have to acquire these skills and practice these skills and what I'm gonna tell you is that walking and running are the highest skills. We have three running coaches at our gym who are experts in running, including Brian, right? That one of the things is we have three coaches who explicit expertise is in sort of teaching running mechanics, and one of the things that we noticed is that this running gait, running correctly is as complicated as some of the Olympic lifts and it's something that we just sort of take for granted. We hear this all the time when we're talking about the conversations with people, well isn't running a natural thing? And one of the things that I'll notice is that I have children and I'm like, my daughters run mechanically beautiful. They just are full of torque and power, and they fall, right, it's amazing. My first grader, Georgia's now in second grade, but first grade last year everywhere these kids are running and they're all beautiful, they go to Christmas and they come back from Christmas, and half of them started heel striking. Half of them suddenly spontaneously changed into this pattern that didn't work correctly and what is interesting is that I didn't know that as second grader or a first grader you'd go home and ask for heel strike for Christmas, but apparently you can get it. And so the question is what changes and we start to see the aggregated effects of not having running mechanics learning, not teaching these as fundamental human skills, we start to see the impacts of wearing high-heel shoes on our children all the time, right? If I jack up your heel two centimeters, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours in a week I'm gonna see the definitive changes in that system, we start to see the cumulative effects of having our kids sit all day long in school and that that six or seven hours of sitting is brutal for you, right? But it doesn't hurt the kids overtly because they haven't had enough duty cycles. Yet we're asking our children to sit in these positions, so when I started to think about this, when I first met Brian I was wearing heavy duty heavy shoes, I had insoles, right?
Yes, yes.
You remember that?
I was just having this conversation with your wife. I'm like I really hope he talks about one of our first interactions was me coming up and spending some time with Kelly at the Stone Clinic where he was originally working and Kelly was in--
Really heavy orthopedic clog shoe.
Hiking boots. Literally I would call it a birth control shoe, right? (laughing) Because it wasn't sexy, and I was like, fine, fine, you win, fine.
Well, it was very NorCal.
Oh, you gotta bring it up.
It was very NorCal. It was the hiking boot with the inserts, and I was very into the environment type of thing.
Here's the deal. When I ran, I had knee pain. And guess what? The first thing that Brian said was, "You have no idea how to run." When I started working with Carl, we identified these other problems that reflected all of these other issues, and it turns out running is a skill, and it's a skill I firmly believe in. The anecdotal story is, of course, that Brian was like, "Get out of those shoes," so I did. I went to a lower shoe, and Brian was like, "Oh, that's 50% there. "Go ahead and make the commitment," so I made a commitment to going to a very, very low, flat shoe made by a company called Innovate, and I ran. It weighs 210 grams. I ran the ultramarathon without an insole in a 210 gram shoe, and I didn't have any pain. Nothing hurt. I wasn't sore the next day.
Let's preface that with the fact of the amount of mobility and things he does in order to allow him to do that so that nobody actually goes out and decides to put on bare feet or a zero-insert 210 gram shoe and destroy themself in an ultramarathon.
Well, and that's right, and so--
Because this has been one of the phenomenons we see.
And that's absolutely right. So one of the questions where we know we're gonna get kickback on is, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, how do I take myself from this? My feet are crack addicted. I just had a conversation off camera where someone was like, "Well, hey, what about an arch support, Brian?"
What about it? Where does the arch ever need to have support?
No, no, no, no, it's an arch, right? Aren't I supposed to hold up the bridge with something in the middle holding up the bridge?
Absolutely not. Look at the other way. It's built like a what? A leaf spring, and if we look at the anatomy of it, we actually see where it's this archway, and we have something that comes down such as the femur and fibula, or I'm sorry, the tibia and the fibula, and we have this area upfront and a lot of wiring or meshing that is underneath and creates something that is of what? Non-weight bearing surface tissue.
Oh, weird. So the arch is a non-weight bearing surface, and we'll see this type one error all the time when people are like, well, I have to wear my arch supports. I'm like, well, do you wear arch supports at home? No, I'm barefoot. Do you wear arch supports on the beach? Oh, no, no, I'm barefoot at the beach. I'm like, so what's the deal there? Well, the deal there is the arch is not weight-bearing surface. We talked today already that, boy, it takes a lot of things. I've pulled myself a long way out of having strong, stable feet. I'm a long ways away from being able to go running around barefoot again, and when my children are at home, we're barefoot as I mentioned before, but, comma, this arch is not a weight-bearing surface.
All the star ats have badass monkey feet. All of them. They all have them. And this is something everybody should strive for, and by that, I mean your foot should literally look like a hand. A hand, meaning your toes should not be touching. They should not be touching, so if they are touching, that is a problem. Now.
So what you're gonna see is that we often make this connection. Hey, how do I know there's something, a problem with my running? How do we know? We get feedback right away that failure by mechanics gives me immediate feedback. There's a problem with my technique. We're asking the question now, hey are there tissue restrictions? Did you have full range of motion in your ankles? How dare you run, sir? You disgust me with that range of motion. Yet you can run just fine. In fact, I bet you'd dust me in a 5K, right? This is the issue is that we can buffer those mad mechanics for a long time, so this is a two-part process today. The first part, is do you understand that now we have a template to start to create the tissue readiness so that I can then perceive and proceed in this skill, and running is a skill. It is the most technically-demanding skill. The short story is that after all of this minutia, getting ready, learning to run, learning and practicing running is a skill, I was able to express that. I had knee pain for 20 years, and then I ran in a mountain 50K in a light, tiny shoe, and I'll tell you, I was probably the second biggest. My other other friend ran it. He outweighed me a few pounds, but we were the only two guys over 220 in that whole race, and at one point, I was halfway through this race, and I use race loosely when you're running for eight and a 1/2 hours, right? It's more like survival. (crowd laughing) But what's interesting is that these runners were like, "What are you doing in here with those shoes?" And I was like, "Ha, thriving," and it really is. It's a paradigm shift. What we wanted to introduce you today is that this is a technical skill that you can begin to practice nonstop, and we want you to start thinking your combat stance is your everyday stance. It's time to get your feet ready. It's time to get your body to do the thing that you were designed to do. To backtrack, there's a little sponge that they use as a model for having a brain, and the sponge has a nervous system, and it moves around the environment, and all of a sudden, that sponge attaches to the rock and it digests its own brain, so why does the brain exist? To move you through the environment, and the question is, why don't you know how to run? Who taught you how to Run, CJ? I don't know, it just seemed natural. I wore my stillsuit desert fashion. It seemed the right way. That's not it. Who taught you to run?
Just did it.
Just did it. Who taught you to run?
Just did it.
Who taught you to run?
Just did it.
It's an Olympic sport, people, and no one taught you this Olympic sport? Who taught you to run? Brian MacKenzie, that's who taught you to run. That's right. (crowd laughing) I know, I know, he taught me to run. So here's the deal, let's set the stage, and I want you to understand that this is gonna be a process that goes on for the rest of your life, and running is so technical and so enjoyable, and learning to run efficiently is extraordinary, and learning to run poorly is a recipe for stenosis, fractures, herniated discs, blown out knees. They used to say, "Oh yeah, you can run, but I had to quit." Why? "Because I'm 40, I'm in my 50s. "Just can't do it anymore," and what we're really saying, at one rep or a million reps, you gotta come out unharmed. Let's make that commitment to coming out unharmed. So, Brian MacKenzie. (crowd clapping)
If you go back one slide, perfect. Half of the running population gets injured in some way every year. I believe that percentage is at actually 79%. (groaning) That's actually down from 85, from close to 85%, so I think that we're starting to have an affect on what people are thinking and doing, and that's pretty important because running is actually what we have considered for a very long time, the most dangerous sport because how many people in the United States or even the world are running, right? And everybody just gets up and goes and runs. There's roughly 45 million people in the United States alone, yet if you take that percentage of 79%, that is a monster percentage of people that are injured every single year. Why? 'Cause they just put on their shoes, go out the door, and think that that's the way it's gonna get done, yet.
Just do it.
Just do it, right? Just do it. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked. You can skip that slide. At any rate, like Kelly alluded to earlier, I was mentored by a guy by the name of Dr. Romanov who created the Pose running method, and I've taken into account a lot of the things that he's taught me, a lot of things that other people have taught me. A lot of the stuff Kelly has taught me, and stuff that I learn almost daily from him and that we learn from each other, and the Cape buffalo actually wins more battles than a lion does, if you did not know that. And if you watch enough National Geographic like I do, because I have to watch other animals run, the Cape buffalo actually can run very well, and I think he got that name when we were in Miami, and we were running on the beach, and we were doing a Tabata for a mile and a 1/2.
I was good for the first 10 seconds.
He was good for the the first--
And then I imploded.
three, and then all of a sudden, you hear this (grunting) and you could hear him breathing, and it was the Cape buffalo, so at any rate, running is not the most natural thing because it actually starts that way for everybody. It actually starts that way for every kid, and Kelly's youngest child is actually a role model of that, and anybody here who has kids or who's watching who has kids under the age of five, they actually probably have a role model for what running is. They'll actually also probably have a role model for squatting, right?
True.
Walking, too. Most people can understand this as I'll go through it, but when you first see a child move or walk for the first time, what is it that happens?
Oh wait a minute, we learned this yesterday with Carl. I displace my center of mass. You're starting to see--
It's a very--
That if I understand one principle, I start to understand everything.
And what is it that happens in a deadlift, ultimately? And this is something that we talked about a long time ago where you're like, I've watched enough dead lifting. Dead lifting is actually just falling back.
Falling backwards.
Falling back. It's just counter-levering some weight, okay? Now, it's gonna take a whole lot of skill and understanding for you to move a lot of weight, but the fact is, is it's all in the same thing. I can relate cycling in the exact same way as well, but the fact is, is if you work with these laws, and Kelly laid out a bunch of laws yesterday and a bunch of things that are of a hierarchy, and all of that really has to take place with mother nature, okay, and the way things work. Everything in this universe needs stability, and it will hunt for it, regardless of what it is, 'kay? We're gonna hunt for stability, and the fact is is we need stability, because if we're not stable, and we're running or we're moving in what we're doing, we are gonna create these violations that will occur in other places in the body, so we will pick these things up in all these other places, whether it's walking or running. If I cannot properly internally rotate in hip extension which was something I actually had to deal with and have dealt with, 'kay, and these are part of the issues that you will deal with if you like to run a lot, 'kay?
And let me hold the sign there, 'cause one of the things is that Brian is a fantastic runner, ultramarathoner, hundred mile runner. Really, really excellent runner, and when you run with him, it's really hard to stay up with him because he's so efficient and so good at it, so we go to his house. Let me tell you this story about this, because even coaches need coaches. And there's this beautiful, huge black and white picture of Brian, and it's amazing, and it was shot for a magazine. He's got all his beautiful tattoos out. He's running through the desert, and I'm like, "Brian, this is a beautiful photo of you," and he's like, "Thanks, man."
My shirt was off.
Shirt was off. And I'm like, "This is a really beautiful photo of you" "Too bad you're in such a retched position." And he could tell. He was like, "Man, I like that photo."
He's like, "You look like a dog "peeing on a fire hydrant, Bri."
Well, it wasn't my fault. It was his fault, right?
Floating through the air.
And the really question, I was like, "And why did you get shot in the back?" And you can see now that--
This is such a gross analogy of what it really looked like.
Gadoosh. (laughing) But if you understand these basic principles, you walk up and say, hey, that's not a perfect spinal position. He's dumping some force there, and I notice that that foot is turning out when he runs.
I would bet that you were the only one who could pick up on that, but he picked up on it. The fact is, is I was overextended, and I was missing internal rotation and hip extension, 'kay?
And let me just follow up, because if you understand the principles, Brian was an efficient, effective runner. Has been for a long, long time, but remember, our goal is not efficient. Our goal is optimal. And one of the questions that you're gonna start to see now is as we move this conversation along beyond, hey I just am into getting out of pain, 'cause you're greedy as a human being. You're ready for the next thing. I wanna go faster. I wanna feel better longer. I wanna be able to lift more weights more quickly, and this is the same conversation. It starts with these core principles. Sorry to interrupt.
No, not at all. It's a great point, because I do know that I run well, because it has been something I've thought about for longer than a decade, and it's something I don't ever stop thing about, but what I also don't stop thinking about is exactly what Kelly's been talking about, and with your other guests who've been on as well, especially Carl and Jill, is I don't stop watching people move. In fact, I shot at the airport this morning. Got a picture of a lady who was just in this position who's creating all these stable places.
It's not me.
That she's looking for--
It's my friends that feed my delusion.
The objective, and I was having this conversation right before I came out, the objective of this weekend or the objective of what it is I do and the objective of what Kelly does is that if you have a conscious thought about what it is you are doing right now and how you're moving, then we have done our job. That is it, 'kay? And you've now started that process of, how can I fix this? Well, you started that process. I'm now thinking about it. We can give you a ton of exercises, a ton of things to do, a bunch of mobilizations, et cetera, et cetera, but unless you're consciously thinking about it, it is never going to happen. I have seen people tweaking mobility positions from all these things, on stuff they've watched on the internet, and they still don't squat right because they're just not thinking about it because they think that you're gonna do, or they hear some videos on me and what they should be doing with running, and landing on the ball of foot, yet they're pushing their foot down at the ground and pointing their foot and doing a lot of things that they should not be doing, and I'll get into that in a second, but what he was getting at is that, even as a very good runner, I am still, I still have to work on everything that I do with running. It doesn't stop. Just because an elite-level athlete, or a professional athlete looks a certain way or does it a certain way doesn't make it right. Understand that. We are physiological freaks. You can adapt to just about any poor position and do very well at it. You can achieve gold medals. You can be a professional athlete for a very long time. You can do a lot of things. That doesn't mean that is the staple of what it is we're looking at in terms of how we should move.
And this is the key concept for this running, is we build this idea this weekend, and we're gonna get to the running part in a second, but the setup we cannot hammer enough. We're saying, hey, here are these movement principles, here's how you fix movement principles, and now, what's this look like as we apply the moment principles? We use the movements to teach the movement principles, and now we're gonna apply these things to a brand new concept and schema, and I'm telling you that this is a discipline in practice.
It's a, very much, this is what this is. If this does not become, if you wanna run better, you are gonna actually have to work at running better. You're gonna actually have to spend the time. There's no magic pill. The greatest trick every played was Houdini told everybody that it was a trick, and he showed them that it was a trick, yet he kept doing it, and is still looked at as the greatest magician that's ever existed, 'kay? So the fact is, is you're gonna still have to do these things, what we're gonna talk about, but you're gonna have to have an understanding of what those are. Number one, your heel was never intended to land at high speeds or by single impact. So, by that I mean, running is defined as being one foot in contact with the ground at a time. We will define the running position, it's very simple, in my position right here. Everybody will go through this position. Now, this is the beginning, and the next position would be my next foot in this position. How you get between those two positions is going to mean a lot, and what happens there? And I have seen some of the most stable people in the world who can pick up weight, squat weight, move weight, do things, go really, really hard, yet the moment they run out the door, all of that gets tossed out and we're doing weird things and starting to move like a train wreck, 'kay? Because what's really going on? It like, just don't understand how this concept relates to what it is I'm doing, so the first thing that we need to understand is that the heel was never designed to land like that, and let's just quickly take you through something like that, so if I can have every one of you just stand up. Set your stuff right on your chairs, or even come forward so maybe the cameras can get you guys, and if you were to turn around, if that's easier, is that easier for everybody if we have 'em turn around so they can see 'em? Perfect. Okay. So, if I were to have every one of you jump rope, we're not gonna have you jump rope, but you're gonna act like you're jumping rope, what would you first do? Now, before you start jumping, I want you to take into account everything you've learned or been here to learn this weekend. Or these last two days, 'kay? So, take that into account and apply it, and show me what jumping rope would look like without spinning your arms. You can just keep your arms at your side. What would you look like jumping rope? And actually, this group pulled this off pretty effectively. Keep going. Now, the better you jump rope, the tighter it's gonna be, the less work you're gonna have to do, and actually, everybody in this room right now, and we've got all these different body types, and all different types of people, they could probably do this for quite a long time, right? Am I right? It's not real hard. Relax. If you have bad knees, ankles, or hips, don't do this. For the rest of you, land on your heels and replicate the exact same thing.
I triple dog dare ya. Now that's not even your toes. You can't even do it.
You can't even do it. But you'll notice, even with the three people that this did just happen with is that, not only they mechanically changed, but there was a lot more noise occurring. That noise is actually feedback, or those are vectors coming back up into the body, and the body has to absorb those, and the ankle was actually absorbing that. The calcaneus, the yeah. And it's a very strange motion, right? And this allows us, you guys can have a seat. This allows us to understand really quickly what, God I love that, nice. You're changed for life, bro. He just set himself up, knees out. When it happens when you go to the toilet, that's when you really know what's happening. (crowd laughing)
So. What--
It's my dream as a boy, men are going to think of me when they tinkle. (crowd laughing)
Even women.
Even women, I know.
Even women.
It's true, it's so hot. (crowd laughing)
Is that even body humor? What is that? I don't know.
So the first thing that I actually asked everybody to do was take into account what they learned here everyday, and that was what?
Spine first.
What?
Spine first.
Spine first. Stability first, right? So, we stabilize first. I set myself up. When your mom, when you were little, and if your mom slapped you on the back of the head or always got on your case when you were sitting at the table and told you to sit upright, your mom was right. When you didn't listen, you were wrong. I was that kid, too. I mean if you can see, I was probably many of the bad kid, but the fact is, is your parents were right, and the fact is, is now I understand that and understand that to a large degree, because posture is everything, and how you sit, I know how you're going to run. How is that? Because the way you're choosing to stabilize in the most, actually, laziest position you could be in, it's actually gonna be your go-to position not only for running, but it's probably gonna be your go-to position for deadlifting, squatting, whatever it is you choose to do, hit a tennis ball, hit a baseball, run to first base, throw a football, RG knee, all these things become grossly apparent when we really just take a look at the way everybody's moving, and running is no different, so the way you just all set up and allowed yourself to just bounce on the balls of your feet, the way you were intended to. There's nobody on this planet that I've seen do any differently.
And this is an interesting test is if you don't believe us, go ahead and run the way you run, and if you're one of those people who contacts heel first, we dare you to try to do that barefoot, which is one of the great tests. You will not do it barefoot.
No, you won't. Not on concrete. There actually was a study, and somebody in the New York Times just put out an article who said they found a tribe of Africans, I don't know if they were Kenyans or what, but they were in a non-running tribe, but they actually did do some running. They weren't where great runners came from, and they actually heel strike barefoot, but that's in the dirt, in soft dirt, and yes, that can happen, and in fact, I've seen people do it in Vibram FiveFingers, but you will never see somebody who runs really well and runs barefoot or actually somebody who runs really well at the world class level, really heel striking. The best runners in the world do not heel strike. In fact, the best form in the world is held by a man by the name of Usain Bolt, and he runs just about as perfectly as we've seen any human being. We're capable of better. He can hit an 18 1/2 degree lean, his cadence matches what, he's just about matched his cadence to what that lean needs, but the fact is, is if we utilize mother nature and these principles that Kelly's talking about, we're actually about a second and a 1/2, I believe, or even close to two more seconds on that 100 meters that we're capable of doing. I'm not that human being. I don't have that capability, nor does the Cape buffalo.
Mind blown.
But let's just use our swimmers as an example as well. The San Jose State women's swim team who, for the last two years I've worked with, brought in Kelly. We brought Kelly in. Kelly is now a large part of this process. This is the first year that they have had no shoulder injuries and are headed back to defend their current WAC title. That's a very, very, very hard thing to come by within the swimming word is not having shoulder injuries on an entire team like that, so these things are apparent, and they become, the more we are thinking about them, become better. So, we've got this beginning stage set up for running, and we need to understand, though, that we've been talking about a knees out concept, and really learning how to land, and one of the things that I did pick up on, though, is the way everybody was actually kinda just jumping around. And when we start to jump, we start to see these things like this, and we also know that these are gonna be some go-to positions for squatting is that we're gonna start to see things like that where we look for stability here. When we put you into dynamic motion, we start to pick up on even more things, and that is one of those things, so it's in actually learning how to stabilize correctly and actually land correctly so that we're stabilizing correctly in that position. So let's have you guys hop back up again.
Let's have you guys maybe come around behind us here and we can talk and look.
Spread yourselves out. It's alright. Good, so see if you can set yourself up, back up again. Feet would be underneath the hips. Right, perfect. We're set up and we're just gonna hop up and down, and let's see what we can see. See if you can get those knees to land correctly. Lot better. 'Cause we're thinking about it, 'kay? Yeah, that's really good. Your feet can even come closer, so. The better we get at hopping, and keep going, is what we like to see, is what I like to start to see is I like to see less bounce, yeah. And what'd you feel when that happened? Here's what something is very interesting. When I have you, so even less bounce, get tighter. Do you feel yourself start to stabilize a little bit more? So the body starts to stabilize a little bit more, and I get a little bit better, and we get into this rigid process to try and just utilize that energy, so we're not using as much energy. Now, if I were to have you to start alternating feet in the same manner, right? Are we landing in the same way? Are those knees landing out or are they starting to cave in? But, and we're starting to see people start to do some weird things now, this is where the weirdness begins, right? And if it doesn't, now. Let's see if you can just pull those feet up underneath your hips as you're doing that. Bounce with it, bounce. Still take that little bounce, but see if you can pull that foot up underneath that hip.
Could you show us what it looks like, Brian?
Yeah. And there's not a whole lotta bounce going on, even with a guy this size, there's not a whole lotta bounce going on. He's just pulling up nice and easy, right? If I get you to not hit my hand, yeah. Better. Good, relax. Whew!
This is tough on those creatives.
That is running 101, right. This is the basics. Kelly actually goes over things that I do with clients or athletes that I first get, whether it be somebody who's a professional athlete, whether it somebody be who is my grandmother or friend, is we actually figure out how to stabilize correctly when we do that from that hollow position on the floor, we learn that that is the basics. Three-minute standard. That is the basic level of what we need to understand. Why? Because if you can't do that from the ground, you are not going to do it while in motion. You are gonna let go.
And remember that. Spine first. So if Brian's saying if, hey, I'm disorganized and I default as I start to run, which is such a common pattern, this is so much easier.
Yeah, remember I gotta comment about a guy who's like, oh mate, you don't even know what you're talking about. Mechanics. The pelvis needs to anteriorly rotate 10 degrees and the core eccentrically loads when we're, and I'm like, whoa.
Whoa, I've seen that before. A jiho is where we've seen that before.
That's a pretty deep, deep mechanical information. How about, what if we actually took the concepts that we do understand, which is actually stabilizing correctly, keeping a neutral pelvis, spine, all these things and applying them.
And when we see this, when we get a lotta feedback from people saying, hey, I'm injured, I'm having pain running. I'm having a problem running. I'm a high-level runner with these problems, the first thing we have to correct is this, and people are so broken. If I'm overextended or have a bad position of the spine, can I control the hip or knee or ankle?
No.
Effectively? No, not until we're back to here and we understand that concept. And I'll tell you that some of the running drills that Brian forced me to do. He's like, "Oh, you were able to run for 30 feet "before you fell apart. "Great, stop, reset." And I was doing 30-foot running sections because that's all I could do, and then when I was really good, I went up to 100, so 100 feet, and then 200 feet, and then 400 feet, then 50 kilometers. So the key here is that, if you're seeing that broken position, I know you can keep going, but we understand that that's a task-dominant model, and it's not keeping within.
Exactly, exactly. So, how do we apply this? Well, let's have you guys sit down, but let's take a couple of you and throw you on the treadmill. Pick any two. Lat, go ahead, go ahead, you're on, you're on.
So let me just sum up for real quick what you were saying.
Yeah. You guys just hang out right here.
I organize my shoulders, and what are your cues here?
Well, first, it's like you're holding on to a piece of paper or a potato chip, okay? Right? But the first things I think about is just anatomical positioning because it's what I think about. The da Vinci thing, always being rotated out, 'kay? Then setting into the shoulders.
Oh, you cleared the rotation first? And then put your into position? Oh, I seem to remember that. Just talked about that in the typing, didn't I? Great, so you see that the same concept. That's what's so nice about our set of skills. You've been speaking this language for two days. You're like, "Oh, I understand why. "'Cause it puts the shoulder in better position," right?
Exactly, exactly, and it's like you said, some of the most fundamental problems we see with runners are elbows out, running like this, and that everything's okay, right? I'm here.
Wait, and isn't that that neck position that Carl talked about? If I this neck skin, that's not okay either, is it? So you are already seeing these basic shapes. So Brian's saying, "Hey, basic shape organized. "I am gonna have to displace "my center of mass a little bit." Oh, you're starting to put all these pieces together. Now let's see if we can constitute them into a really, really complex skill.
Yeah, exactly. So let's have you guys get on these treadmills and see if you can just apply what it was we were doing. Start at a really low speed, and then I wanna show the world, I wanna show everybody else who's watching as to what happens as the speed increases and how things will change, and what we choose to do as the intensity gets further and further, or even the volume, because that's the correlate here, is we could use load and we can use intensity, or we can use volume, and one of my big cues is that we, or big things, is that we don't like to apply long-volumed things, because most people cannot handle going and running for long periods of time in a new position. That does not mean there aren't people who can, and those people are fine to go out and apply that, but let's just use two gentlemen who I've never worked with personally, right? And let's see what happens. So let's start at maybe just a relatively easy pace, and apply exactly what it is we just went over, 'kay? (treadmill beeping) Engage. (crowd laughing) (treadmill beeping) Somebody set this up. (treadmill beeping) And maybe this one doesn't work. (treadmill beeping)
Brian, why don't you come over here, and I'll monkey with that?
Yeah.
Why don't you get started over here?
Okay, so one of the things we're seeing right now is typical of a lot of people that make the transition over to finding that ball of foot and wanting to run on the ball of foot, and it's called a reach, and you can kinda his front foot reach towards the ground, and one of the things you'll notice if you start to pay attention is when you go down stairs, are you reaching out in front of you like this for the stairs versus allowing yourself to lower to that stair and going with gravity, so one of the first, the reason I actually like treadmills is I like to just kinda getting in the way of what's going on and kinda stop the movement or stop what's going wrong. And as we speed things up, things actually change a little bit more, and he's actually getting a little bit better.
So Brian, you said earlier, I just suddenly became aware of his displacement. How much up and down should I be going?
As little as possible. As little as possible.
Are you saying that every time I go up and down, that's a whole lot of weird energy loss?
So, this is like, use this as an example. As Ryan Hall had four inches of up and down vertical travel, and four inches over a marathon equates to go up and over the Empire State Building a few times, I guess. I think it equated to 3.1 or almost a 5K more of running that he was doing by his vertical displacement. Most African runners that we've seen have four centimeters of vertical travel.
This is over a marathon, right?
This is over a marathon.
So running five-minute miles.
Five-minute miles.
Four centimeters is how much their head variates. It's very efficient.
It almost looks like, if you had something that was blocking them from the waist down so you couldn't see their legs, they were traveling, they were sliding across an escalator versus when you'll see typical American runners or people who have not been running well their entire lives, we're going up and down, up and down, up and down, so that vertical displacement starts to wreak havoc on us. It's an eccentric load. It's something that this is why our tissue gets beat up. It's not because we're out there aerobically for a long time. It's because you're actually pounding, pounding, pounding and you continue to pound, and the higher you go up, the farther you fall down.
Okay, so take us through. I'm a terrible runner.
Yeah.
Take me through the step. Give me the four ideas to what are my basics? What do I should be thinking about?
Stability, right? Position. This is the running position, right? Am I landing anywhere differently than this position, right? So if I were to take a forward moving body, let's just call it a wheel, 'kay? If that wheel were moving forward, why does that wheel work so well? Nobody knows?
Lack of friction. Yes. The scientist in the group breaks that out. It's lack of friction, right? But think of gravity at work, and here's the concept nobody has ever really taken into, in the running world, is nobody equates for this. They just talk about everything else that goes around it, and we're the ones that are producing the force. In fact, we don't produce crap in terms of force. We don't. I don't care how mighty and great you think the human race is, we don't know what force is, 'kay? Mother nature has all of it, 'kay? We can't build a bomb that will even equate to what a hurricane can do, 'kay? Gravity is a constant, and it is something that you forget about, and it's why you're sitting the way you're sitting in your chair, because you've given up in some way or decided to fight in some way about what it is you are doing, okay? And how gravity's affecting you. Gravity is a constant, and it's pulling down as a constant. You have a contact point with the ground. Seated, you have three unless your hands decide to grab on to something, you have five. When I'm running, I have one, 'kay.
Now let me pull this back. Didn't Carl say that the ultimate expression of freestyle was that rolling on to a single leg? That the control and stability through that single foot was one of his expressions? Can you see how that relates suddenly? That this running requires suddenly a lot of stability. Didn't we see that if I was missing ankle range of motion that I might turn my foot out when I jump and landed? Can you see how suddenly this becomes a very untenable position no matter what I do? And now we start to make the links between, oh, my foot should be straight when I land. Yes, no? So if I'm seeing someone run, or I'm running myself and my foot isn't straight, that's an error.
For example, if I land in front of this forward moving body, what am I doing? Putting on the breaks. I've just added friction. I've just made it that much more difficult. I've just loaded up my tissue very differently than landing directly underneath myself.
Now you say when, and this is your quote, I think, or your statistic, if I'm landing, it can be upwards of six times body weight on one leg?
It's actually three times, but nobody really, not a lot of people, unless you're a mathematician or work for NASA really understand what that three times body weight is, and for somebody Kelly's size, that's probably close to 1,000 pounds, 'kay? (crowd laughing) No, no, no no.
The internet does make my butt look big. We all have to take that--
You have to think about the force, the way he's landing. His force is going down. The force is coming back. The way he's absorbing, 'kay.
The change in that force.
All these things are happening, and the further he lands in front and the faster he's going, the more force he's actually putting, and if I land like this, I'm gonna tend to do something like that, and I've just done what? I've loaded up my anterior chain in a way that I might have developed patellofemoral syndrome, IT band syndrome, you name it. We've seen it, we hear it. It's all the same thing, 'kay? We know that there's really only two reasons we get injured, and everything is just kind of a variable of that, and it's either creating leverage or stopping the movement, and this being, I'm stopping my movement. I'm slowing that down. I'm creating more friction. We need to cut that out.
Theoretically, my foot goes down, and it takes me a second, 'cause I'm translating. The leg comes behind me, right, at some point.
Yes, yes.
It's gonna come behind me.
Yeah, it has to.
It's not like I'm running just right underneath and falling forward.
And this is where gravity really has its greatest benefit.
Okay, so I'm falling. That leg translates behind me before I put my other foot down. How much hip extension is involved there?
I think we found about a maximum of 20, 25%.
So if we look at how much range of motion's required, did those guys easily put their hips behind their body when they're in this position when we were up on the couch stretch? Oh, interesting. So it turns out, do they have potentially, the full capacity to achieve the finished position in running? No, and here's that concept is that is we think about this as a technical skill, and it's very, very technical, and all you have to do is come to a CrossFit Endurance running course, and you spend two days learning how to run for the first time.
Two full days of this stuff.
Of learning how to run. What you will also see is that now we have a conversation about understanding, am I prepared to do the running, because I know you're still gonna be able to get out of the way of the car no matter what because your body's set up for adaptation. You're gonna be able to continue to do this even if it costs you your knees.
So this whole concept of gravity is something that's relatively new, and nobody's really grabbing onto, but this is everything we're talking about but maybe just in a different way, but as Kelly was getting at, where you come in to hip extension, I'm gonna actually have Kelly get into that position. If he were to hold his foot up as if he were running here, and I'm gonna have him come all the way forward into hip extension, I will not let you go. Now if I can get him to get his torso vertical, boom. How much load do you feel on your hamstring, your glutes?
It's all butt.
All of that, right? So this lever that's been created right now and what happens when I let him go in this position? What was the first thing that happened? (audience member faintly speaking) Put on the breaks. Now, if I were to prepare him a little bit further and say, Kelly, no. I want you to pull your support foot, your point of support off the ground first, watch what happens if he can actually correlate that, and watch the speed at which what happens with that. So if I get him forward. Now, I want you to pull that foot first. He moves faster. Holy crap. What just happened? What happened? He fell.
Frictionless.
He fell. This is the only point at which you get faster. You don't get faster by (crowd laughing) pushing myself on the ground and creating
Welcome back to Monte Python CreativeLive.
Right?
Silly Walk edition. (crowd laughing)
If I'm creating more friction, so if I take this wheel and I flatten it out, I just say, I want you to go as fast as this wheel, I want wheel number one to go as fast as wheel number two. Sure, if it's got enough motor, it will, but how much more energy's gonna be expended? Lot more, right? Movement is about efficiency.
So can you spin this back into walking for a second?
Oh.
When I walk, I'm not necessarily walking on my toes when I walk.
No.
My heel goes down first.
Oh, and just fine.
Okay, but does it change? Am I still doing some kind of push walk, or am I? (crowd laughing)
How many people have seen people walking around like that? I've seen it.
They do, they do.
People do.
But what ends up happening when I walk? What should I be thinking? How do I initiate my walk?
What?
Oh.
I fall.
If you watch kids run, how do they initiate all their running? They're like, "Okay, dad." And they start running towards you, don't they? They figured it out.
It happens a little faster than that, but yes, that is exactly what happens.
Well, they're this tall.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no. (crowd laughing) He slowed it down, and people are gonna be like, "Wait a second," no. The fact is, that is what happens, is that is how we are supposed to initiate, and the better I am at falling, the less fear I actually have of falling, the easier this actually becomes.
And look what this is. If everyone knows I need to displace forward, this is how we walk, but it's easier and costs less if I go bone-on-bone, keep my torso upright, and now I can walk because I've tipped the whole system, and if I tip the whole system, and we really match that, it would be the same thing as leaning, but I've just kinked so I can keep my torso.
One of the first things that Kelly brought to my attention when I had originally worked with him was he just found out what his butt did for a living, and that was via the running and also when we walk, and the fact is, is his butt's always on. My butt's always on. Your butt should always be on. It should be on to stabilize, especially when, as I'm walking, my butt is supporting me underneath. If it is not supporting you as you're underneath, and as hard as this is gonna be to think about, that maybe you do need to think about squeezing your butt when you walk. If it is not on, you will break. You're not supporting that system.
Jill used the analogy with the traps, remember? She said that muscle has a lot of heavy duty connective tissue to support it. Well the same thing is true with the glutes, and I made a light comment, just a light, passing comment that I would never eat someone's glutes first, because they are so tough, and one of the reasons they are so tough is they're designed to keep the torso upright and simultaneously extend the hip for thousands of low-level reps a day. Thousands and thousands and thousands.
High-volume.
10,000 steps. This is why this is so important that you walk with feet straight. We start to get disorganized about falling using the scale model of walking and falling, is that 10,000 steps a day is 70,000 steps a week, which is over a 1/4 million steps a month, and now you start to do that, that's three or four million steps walking poorly during the year, and then that's four million steps a year. Let's go ahead and walk back out. And I'm a runner now, and in and 740 steps in 400 meters, but I'm a marathoner, and you can imagine the number of duty cycles, and that's why we're like, human beings are awesome. We are pro-human, comma, we are amazed that we don't break down earlier.
I think one of the best analogies you ever gave me was the fact that the people that exist in Las Vegas that they can get up day in, day out, 'cause we've been out to Vegas to work quite a bit in a sober state, and seen first-hand what lives and exists in Vegas.
There was a woman, this is what he's referring to. There was a woman in an elevator with us who was like five feet wide, two feet tall. She had one of those nine foot Budweisers. She was chain smoking, had a bag of donuts. She looked awful.
But she was alive.
And she was flirting with us.
Yeah.
And she felt amazing. And we both walked out of there, and we were like, humans are awesome. Humans are awesome.
We will adapt to whatever it is we need to adapt to, 'kay? You can adapt to being better at what it is you're doing.
So, just real quick, we're starting to kinda run out of some time. Take homes about, I have this basic concept of where to go that I need to be neutral and braced here. I need to land with my foot straight, and I need to think about that falling, and there's plenty. Your site, I mean you just put up on your channel, a little mini-series about how to run.
Yeah, I gotta YouTube channel. It's a mini-series. It's all the basics of all of this stuff, 'kay? Through CrossFit Endurance, 'kay? Where you actually can get all the basics of all of this information.
Are you advocating now that I go out and just immediately run barefoot?
No.
Are you advocating that I go from my high heel Nike Double Shock pump back to a low, minimal shoe and go run a 5K.
No.
Okay, so what we're saying is, you need to be thinking about progressing there. Remember, we said, hey, this 30 degrees is functional, but it's not optimal or it's a conversation about getting us back into that regular state.
There are people who will adapt quickly. There are the rest of us, 'kay, where it's gonna take time. You can't just jump from something this high in the heel, that low in the foot, in the forefoot, down into something that's zero differential. You're going to suffer the consequences of that. Your achilles tendon probably, over a lifetime, you might get that much range of motion out of it, and yet you're gonna take it from something that's seven millimeters in length up and take it down. You're asking a lot. You're gonna suffer consequences, and I've seen it. I have seen it time and time again, so think about what it is you're doing. Take the time to not only mobilize. Deal with that stuff. But the biggest--
Could we say this?
Yeah.
How about this. As some homework, take-home, what about walking around barefoot a little bit?
That is absolutely what every human being should be doing every day. If you don't walk around barefoot for at least an hour a day, you are depriving yourself of something.
In fact, is we did a little series recently about kinda getting people back into correcting their feet, correcting some of the leg mechanics. One of your homeworks was like, hey, you need to go walk 400 meters outside. Just walk around barefoot.
Walk 400.
Shocking if you walk beyond these 10-foot increments how weak your feet are. There's that question about that collapsed foot, and how you have no idea of what's going on. You even advocate, sometimes you're like, "Hey, if you're gonna run barefoot, "why don't you go run on a hard surface? "Because you will not impact the ground." In fact, when you're barefoot and you walk around on the street, you're like, whoa, I have to be a little bit softer.
Correct.
Not going up and down a lot, am I?
And evolution as it is actually takes thousands and thousands if not millions of years to occur, and we've only had concrete around for so long, so don't think that just going and barefoot running on concrete is something that your feet are gonna adapt to. You will never adapt to that, and you'll pick up other problems, 'kay? So, that doesn't mean that you need to be in shoes all day, but it also doesn't need to mean that you're barefoot all day, 'kay? So, take time. We've actually got some things to deal with that, but I think the biggest takeaways with what we wanna deal with with running is that everything is about position. Everything is about setup. Everything is about utilizing and being efficient with what it is we know, and that is, how does mother nature work, because it is the most powerful thing we know of. Work with it. So if I can get in the correct position and then I can use gravity and I can pull my foot up underneath myself and I can remain stabilized, go run as long as you want. If I can only go 30 feet, then you start with 30 feet and maybe repeat that a few times until you can go to 60 feet, until you can go to 400 meters, until you can go to 800 meters, and that's how it really works.
Let's pause there. Thank you, Brian. That was sick. (crowd clapping) Running is so easy. It's only taking me years of dedicated practice to not hate it.
It's only taken me 12.
That's right, and so I think, do we have a couple questions for Brian that we could take?
Yes, we would love to take a couple questions for you and then make sure everybody knows where they can find you, so let's start with that.
Let's start with that. Where can we find you, Bri?
You can go to crossfitendurance.com. You could go to brianmackenzie.com or you could just Google Brian Mackenzie and you will find tattooed pictures and things of me. I guess.
Unscared.
Unscared.
Right there.
Nice.
I love it. Okay, we have a question from Yooie Question who wonders, running body mechanics versus walking mechanics. Why is it that heel striking is the choice for walking but not for running.
Great question. Walking requires two feet in contact with the ground at the same time which means I've got two points of contact. There's not a whole lot of pressure on that foot like that whereas with one foot in contact with the ground at a time, you can even feel it if I pull that foot up off the ground, how that loads up, and the tissue on the heel, the tissue around the calcaneus, which is where the heel is, the heel bone, it is a fat pad, correct me if I'm wrong, good doctor,
That's right.
fascia, and skin. The ball of your foot is designed as such as a landing pattern like a leaf spring, so that when I land, that's why when we jump rope, it's so easy. How's that?
Excellent.
That's great.
Great, how about anyone in the audience since you guys are here? Yes.
Yes.
Lots of runners you'll hear complain about IT band and tightness and how to work that, how to make it more mobile. Do you have any suggestions?
Squat. (crowd laughing)
So what you heard, the answer is, he's right. The core value is, are we moving correctly in all these fundamental patterns? So if we know that I could have tightness in the system that's pulling up on the connective tissue,
Absolutely.
But what's causing this in the first place? Do you think it's efficient running mechanics that is causing this? So if my IT band runs down, it creates a septum, a wall between my quads and my hamstrings. Looks like an I-beam. It's not just this outside, so it's very tight, but most of the time people are having problems is right down here, so imagine if all of a sudden, my foot turns out a little bit, does that IT band and leg have to suddenly take a 30 degree turn? How many times does it take for me to run in this position or to strike and start to irritate this tissue? You can see.
I don't know. How good are your genetics?
Oh, that's right.
Right? The IT band is actually not the problem. You can't do anything with it. In fact, he talked about hanging a car off the Golden Gate Bridge with it.
That's pretty much.
Because it is so thick and fibrous. It's just something that's gonna stop your knee at some point from caving in, so it is exactly what Kelly's talking about.
Let's fix that mechanic. Is that foot straight? And then as we look upstream on the tissues, we work on the tissues that insert onto it, and we can buy us some of the tissue that tensions it, the TFL, the tensor fasciae latae, but the real issue is that why--
Nine times outta 10, 'kay, it's that knees out concept and what Kelly's talking about with squatting is I'm stabilizing here and learning to stabilize here. When I don't stabilize here with those glutes, which actually ties into that TFL, which then becomes the IT band, when I'm stabilized out like this, when I'm stabilized laterally, I'm set up. That tissue is now firing and working. When I am not, regardless if I land straight or not, if I'm stabilizing here, that tissue is not stabilizing., which is why when we squat, that knee's out.
It would be better if that IT band was like a fragile egg that you broke on the first bad step, but instead, you train for a marathon, and then at week 19, when you run 22 miles poorly, your knee blows up.
If I continue to run poorly and in a poor position, I will suffer the consequences of that.
So foam rolling doesn't really. People say to do it. Should we not?
Well, remember, I can affect the tissue on the surface of that, and I could affect how that relates to the tissues around it, but am I actually gonna change the length of that IT band? Unlikely. It is almost like--
Smashing and rolling and doing all that stuff is always going to alleviate some of the symptoms, the inflammation and deal with a lot of that stuff, a lot of the pain and things that are going on, but it'll never deal with the mechanics of the movement.
And the best way we know to do that is to get you moving again and training that basically.
The only way I know is to actually put somebody in a strength and conditioning environment and show them something new and show them something that is gonna require them to move in these function patterns, in these ways, that they will adopt in their sport-specific position.
Kelly, we have so many questions for Brian.
Great.
I know we're a few minutes over his time,
Oh, that's okay.
but we still have 25 minutes to go 'til the end, so.
Sure, let's do it.
Let's do it. Great questions. We can go ahead in the audience.
Go ahead.
So I just wanted to point out very quickly that even professional runners think that squatting makes everything better, number one, awesome technique. About 2 1/2 years ago, I found that article that you guys were talking about the photo in, and it led me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole to Romanov's videos on YouTube, and I basically trained myself to pseudo-run the Pose method via YouTube videos. I've never had the opportunity to train under anybody who actually knows what they're doing, but my daughter's 10 years old and runs like a train wreck, and I've tried my heart out to try and fix her in some way, but I think I'm a little too emotionally involved in the situation.
Probably.
Are there some resources that we can tap into for training children or younger athletes or people that have just fallen off the genetic bandwagon?
Where are you at?
North Carolina.
Find a coach, and I'm positive we actually have coaches in North Carolina.
Okay.
Yeah, find a coach, somebody who understands the mechanics, who teaches this. Have them work with the coach.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, need coaching.
Everybody, and this is how we define coaching, is it's somebody who's actually watching you move, not somebody who's just--
Not a programming.
Yeah, not really programming.
You don't need workouts. You need to have someone watch you move and do drills, and what you'll see is that like these other skills, the running skills, skill practice, sets us up for better running mechanics, and so the Brian's genius, of course, is understanding the archetype, understanding how to prepare the body and rectify the body, and in fact, you have a book that just came out.
Oh yeah, Power Speed Endurance.
Which contains a lot of these techniques, and a lot of these skill transfer exercises. Oh, well it turns out that running's still an acquired skill. There's a lot that I can do to be working on our mechanics. We should be drilling.
Yeah. And it's something she's gonna have to drill, drill, drill, drill. I have worked extensively with the high school level and even younger, and girls typically growing up have, because the way girls develop through puberty and at that age, that Q angle becomes a little different, which isn't the problem, but the problem is that they're not dealing with those changes that are occurring, so that hip is developing, and we start to see funny things like legs and feet twisting and doing these weird things.
And when we teach kids how to move the whole time, we don't ever have those funny things.
Never.
Kids that are squatting. So lemme give you in a case report that when my daughter, she and her friend, go and play volleyball, and one of the things that happens is that I watch 50 girls jump, and 48 knees come in every single time they jump, and then the two girls I know who are squatting jump, and when they go jump and dunk the basketball, their knees don't come in. And this is that same concept over and over again. We have to teach people how to move. You need to go find a coach.
And this is like that RG3 thing, is it's like, how many people do you think are around that guy that are telling him, dude, you don't mechanically move. You jump from this position, you step back in the hole, and that, no. You need to be in a different position, bro.
Let's straight these out. Great.
Other than squatting, what other drills could you do for the knee in or the foot out.
Deadlift.
Deadlift. (laughing)
Well, and what--
Lunge.
So--
Plenty of things. Jumping. My girlfriend, for instance, went from being a seated phenomenal gold medalist athlete to being an upright, walking, running athlete and is finding out that I need to learn how to jump with knees out and just jumping rope and learning how to get those knees to land and create torque via just jumping rope will change everything.
Wait, didn't Carl talk about that? If my feet are together, doesn't that block and force certain movement patterns?
No.
Didn't we talk, no. Didn't we talk about how if, how the kids jump and land with their feet together? So what we're seeing is that teaching people to put that foot down straight and absorb force and not collapse is also a learned skill.
Alright, fantastic.
Almost like we're all friends and talking, and having the same conversations. Cats sleeping with dogs.
Funny that.
What?
That's great. How about one more question for Brian from the internet?
Okay, great, great. So we had several people that were talking about these mechanics and Pose running with regard, the differences between sprinting and endurance running.
There's absolutely zero difference.
That was easy. How about one more?
Actually, maybe one minute difference. The magnitude at which you're pulling, 'kay? The lean is always gonna be dictated on how fast you wanna go. It's always about how much gravity you're trying to utilize, but it's how much you're pulling. You will see with slower runners, somebody who's running at a 10-minute mile pace, that that position of pull is maybe this high. Where you're gonna see somebody with Usain Bolt, where that position is up this high, and that just means that because he's leaning further, he has to turn over quicker, and that quicker requires more magnitude of that pull.
Great. Alright, since that was such an easy one, let's do one more.
Okay.
One more real final question. Marie Q. from Chicago, Travel Bug, Cook Esquire want you to talk about shin splints. What causes them, how to avoid them, that sorta stuff.
Overloading of the tissue in the calves. It's simple. There's two reasons you're either doing it. You're either locked out with your ankles or you're pushing off, and your calves just have not developed enough, or you're just under developed, and basically what that tissue's doing is just growing rapidly or trying to deal with that, and it's pulling off of the periosteum.
We see a lot of heel strikers, that tissue is decelerating all the time, and that is one of those mechanisms for that. We'll see athletes who also have, if we had to build that mobility prescription, or start to look at, is the tissue itself above this problem, is it stiff? And it turns out those anterior tissues of your leg are very stiff. Most people in this room have spent some time working on the back of their calves, right? I gotta have my flexible calves. If you spent and looked at the time and the relationship between how much you spend on the back of your legs, the time you spend on the front of your legs, do you think that those are commensurate? Even one to three in a ratio? No way, it's like one to 50, and you forget about you even have the front of your legs. Can you imagine
What?
If you only mobilized your hamstrings and were like, "What are these?"
I thought it was just my shin--
These are quads, and so we see really stiff, ugly fibrotic tissue that doesn't resist deformation and gets stiff because of the poor mechanics in going. Working downstream, I usually see people who have shin splints also are missing full ankle range of motion. Weird.
Weird.
Alright, so--
There's always room for so much more potential.
There is, there is. Alright, so once again, we are gonna give a final thank you to Brian. (crowd clapping) Don't go away. Back over to you, Kelly.
Alright, so if you are like me right now, you're thinking, okay, day three, ready to go? And probably what you're feeling a little bit in the background is you're feeling a little cooked. If you've been paying attention to this for two days, chances are, you are like, where do I start? And what's already amazing are those significant changes in your conscious and psyche about being organized, about being awareness, and it takes time. What we literally feel are like, a full day, a second full day about this, is enough to sort of have a catalyst for change in conscious and awareness. Remember, our whole scheme about this was that, do you understand a few basic principles about how to move? Start there. Can you integrate that into the best practices that you can? Today was about fixing some of the breakdowns in those problems. If you are an efficient mover, you require very little care and watering. Just very little feeding and watering. You just have to do the minimum, and so what we're always striving for is this optimization. Start being your own tinkerer. Start working on these things. The goal of this two-day course was sort of democratize this process. I just found out, I knew you guys replayed it right after you put it up. I just found out that you rebroadcast it again in the night. It just goes on and on. There is not an excuse for this not to be out in the world, and we believe that if we could create a basic primer, let this be the 1% idea that sparks your imagination, because this 1% catalyst is enough to already change your consciousness and change your performance and change your experience in life, and if now your curiosity's piqued, there are brilliant coaches, brilliant educators out in the world who are ready, ready to have you understand a little bit more. There are so many resources available to you on the internet. All you need to do is find one that you trust, and the one that you trust is important. So I'm gonna say that let's pretend like you trust me a little bit. Well, it turns out I've had Brian Mackenzie on MobilityWOD, and then you find out I've had some of the best power lifters in the world on MobilityWOD, and you start to talk to them. Oh, those guys, they get it. Carl Paoli's on MobilityWOD a ton. Oh, I start to understand. Oh, we've had Jill on a whole bunch because her thinking, and what happens is you start to create a little ecosystem where you're starting to kind of collect a unified field theory of movement, a unified field theory of mechanics, and suddenly, it becomes background, and any skill acquisition, you struggle for with a while, and then you start to become competent, and then your understanding goes a little bit more, and it's amazing what one degree of change on the horizon will represent over time. If we just get that tanker nudged a little bit a direction, if we give it enough time, you are gonna be facing another direction. Now look, lemme be clear. If you think that the next level of sport, at the next level of the university, at the next level of the military or the national league, someone is gonna take care of these problems, they're not. If you think someone's gonna parachute in and grab your kids and teach them this, you're wrong. It's you. Do you think that your mom is gonna have hip pain and that you're just hoping that the physician who's crushed with time is gonna be that magic person who deals with it, it's not gonna happen. It's up to you, and what's so great is that we know that, well, it's just very little input. The body is receptive for this bounty, and it really, really does wanna thrive. You are basically putting governors on your performance, your capacity, and your wellness, and your happiness, and your experience in life, and if you just take those hand brakes off, and you become that agent for change, even for your just few friends, I know you can be a little zealous and blow people out, stop talking about that Kstarr guy, right? But what we know is that if you start solving the problems immediately, then those problems ripple out, and you'll actually become the expert as you have become the expert in your local community, your friends and cohorts, so please. My recommendation to you is take a crack at it. 10 or 15 minutes a day, you dedicate yourself to fixing the mechanics and all day long, you make your combat stance your everyday stance, and when you start to integrate this, pretty soon, we're gonna see people around the world. It's gonna spread like a virus. The supple texting position. This is like, when you text like this, since I invented this position, when I see people text like this, I'm like, "I see you." And then you don't even have to be, you could walk past somebody like, "I know what's up. "I know you know what's up." So here's the deal. First and foremost, thank you to the CreativeLive staffing and crew. You guys, give these guys a hand. (crowd clapping) Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Secondly, unbelievable to you guys for giving up two days of your life you'll never get back. Thank you so much for being part of the greatest experiment of my life, honestly. This is one of the most important experiments and experiences in which I've ever been involved. This idea is that this is a living body that I think can potentially. I mean, we didn't get anything wrong, so this thing could live for decades. That you can be like, remember back in ' when that CreativeLive thing happened. Yeah, that thing changed everything. This could be that kernel for change, and you guys have been part of it, and out in the world, you guys have been part of it, too, and it is so greatly appreciated, so thank you very much.
Who's inspired? (laughing) So let's please give a round of applause for Kelly Starrett. Thank you so much for your presentation. (crowd clapping)

Class Description

This class offers an ultimate guide to resolving pain, preventing injury, and optimizing athletic performance. Mobility expert and SF Crossfit founder Kelly Starrett has taught tens of thousands of people, from elite athletes to weekend warriors, how to improve their movement and positioning to fix inefficiencies and avoid injuries. Kelly offers a healthy “how-to” blueprint for moving about in our hectic everyday lives. How do you fix your position while sitting at your desk at work for hours on end? How can you lift your kids without hurting your back? What’s the best way to run avoiding long-term injury? Kelly will give you all the tools you need to perfect your movement and ensure long-lasting health and mobility, unlocking reservoirs of athletic capacity you didn’t even know you had.

a Creativelive Student

Excellent working manual for the body, taught in a clear manner with plenty of hands on exercises. You will feel better after taking this course. I'd like to suggest that a "recommended equipment" pack/list be set up, as that would let people get the most benefit out of it from the first time they see it. Great work, I'd like to see more.

a Creativelive Student

Excellent working manual for the body, taught in a clear manner with plenty of hands on exercises. You will feel better after taking this course. I'd like to suggest that a "recommended equipment" pack/list be set up, as that would let people get the most benefit out of it from the first time they see it. Great work, I'd like to see more.

a Creativelive Student

Really amazing collection of thinkers - Jill Miller was the bait for me to tune in, but I found each presenter offering a wealth of logical, well organized information that is relevant for my own body, the yoga students I teach, the clients I have that come to physical therapy, and for the evolution of how we think about health and optimal living potential. Thanks for bringing each presenter to me!